Keep students learning over the holiday break

Posted
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 12:00 am

Holidays are a wonderful time of year, when people can take some time off to visit with friends and relatives, and take a short break to recharge.

With the holidays comes time off from school for students. While this provides students with a chance to relax for a week or so, the break also presents a challenge to educators, since students who are not exercising their brains are in danger of forgetting what they have learned in class.

During the break, parents, grandparents, guardians and relatives can all help keep kids on track without disrupting their vacation simply by suggesting some educational activities.

Having a student spend some time reading –– whether it’s a book, a comic, a magazine, a newspaper, or a website –– can provide him or her with an opportunity to learn a new way of thinking about the world, and can help build grammar and vocabulary skills.

On a similar note, keeping a student writing can help improve these same skills, with the addition of teaching composition, which is notoriously tricky to teach. Keeping a journal or a diary, writing creatively, or simply putting together some letters and thank-you cards can be immensely useful exercises for communication skills during students’ time off.

Educational activities aren’t relegated to indoors, either.

School breaks, including the upcoming holiday one, provide an opportunity for families to visit educational and interesting institutions and events. Art and history museums, zoos, cultural events, and historical sites make for a fun way to keep students learning, and expose them to details in a more interesting way than dry facts in a textbook.

Keeping students more involved during their time off means teachers will not need to spend as much time reviewing material when school starts up again, allowing them to cover more material overall.

With tougher state test score standards, and a more competitive economy going forward, our students need every advantage we can give them.

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